Erik Nelson

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What could have been a revealing but relatively dry documentary is given the usual twist by genius filmmaker Herzog, who turns a glimpse of rarely seen prehistoric cave paintings into a bravura 3D exploration of human history.

Discovered in 1994, the Chauvet caves in southern France were sealed by a landslide 20,000 years ago and contain the oldest paintings ever seen. More than 30,000 years old, they depict the wildlife of prehistoric Europe - horses, rhinos, lions, bison - with a remarkable sense of movement. And the caves themselves are pristinely beautiful, with stalactites, stalagmites and a remarkable collection of animal bones. But what was the world like back then, when Europe was under ice and our ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals?

Let's take a ride in the Wayback Machine to the 1970s, a fantasy time where people wore moods rings, collected pet rocks, and paid out 62 cents a gallon at the OPEC-regulated gas pumps. It was also a time when there were only 12 TV channels but always something on. There were plenty of talk shows on public television and local stations featuring interviews lasting longer than five minutes. And back then people read books, a conclusion drawn from the glut of authors that appeared on those talk shows. From S. J. Perelman to Norman Mailer and everybody in between, writers were talk show regulars (John Kenneth Galbraith got as much airtime in 1978 as Richard Simmons does today). But there was one particular talk show positioned at the proper hour to greet drunken and debauched college students staggering to bed after the booze ran out -- the late night/early morning Tom Snyder talkfest The Tomorrow Show, which frequently featured writers pontificating for an entire hour through Snyder's cigarette smoke. One of Snyder's favorite crank writers was science fiction (excuse me, "speculative fiction") writer Harlan Ellison, whose jeremiads on the show succeeded in sobering up many a college bum, particularly when Ellison sucker-punched the psyche with head-banging aphorisms like, "I think revenge is a very good thing for everybody."

This particular clip and many more from The Tomorrow Show figure prominently in Erik Nelson's Dreams with Sharp Teeth, an ebullient and celebratory bouquet to Ellison, the Last Angry Author. Ellison's writing output since he began writing for pay in 1955 makes the output of, say, Agatha Christie, look like peanuts -- 75 books and 1,700 stories, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and still counting (a clip from The Today Show features Ellison in a store window with a typewriter, banging out a story from scratch in under five hours). With such a massive, high-quality literary yield, Ellison rightly deserves the adulation of Nelson.

Some of the most interesting documentaries of recent years have starred weird men consumed with their obsessions. Werner Herzog's entertaining, engrossing, tragic, and occasionally hilarious Grizzly Man is perhaps the first about a weird man who was literally consumed by his passion.

Timothy Treadwell, the title subject, spent 13 summers frolicking with Alaska's grizzly bears and other wildlife. As far removed from reality as he was from civilization, he believed himself to be a student and protector of the bears. But late one season, he and his girlfriend became a grisly lunch.